Trying to see things in a different way: that's still less than a seat for a Ringo Starr show, and probably amusement for a longer time

I have a similar philosophy when buying things and always asks myself "how many years will I be using this thing before I stop needing it or grow tired of it and eventually resell it?" and then divide the price by the amount of years.
This gives a usage price per year which usually is reasonable if you plan to hold onto the object of desire for some time.

If one planned, for example, to keep that 182 $ Microdisk for 10 years, that would result in a usage price of 18.2 $ per year, followed by a sale.
All in all, a very good price given the enjoyment it would procure.

Of course, that requires to not buy thousand of these as one encounters them on eBay, otherwise ruins quickly ensues.
But as long as one buys only what they use, this seems like a reasonable approach to me.

You guys are rignt, actually... While I think such prices are still exaggerated, thinking in terms of "usage price" helps put it in perspective to other costs... And effectively, you can also consider that you will probably be able to regain some or all of your costs if you resell the actual thing when you no longer have any use for it, at possibly the same price or even more, who knows...

Mmm not sure. This price escalation does no good. We are buying hardware which is 30+ years old just for nostalgic reasons, maybe for preservation.

Your calculation has a small flaw, I'd say. How many times in a year will you enjoy, or actually use at all, that hardware? That Microdisc with a 3" unit, that makes it almost impossible to transfer disk images to it? Once a month? Every two months? A few days during your holidays? The rest of the time it will be there, just as a collector's device, or even worse, stored in a locker most of the time.

$182/10 years is indeed $18.2 per year, but if you use it twice a year it is almost as if you paid $9 each time you want to boot Sedoric on the real machine just for the fun of it. Two hours at most of play and that is all. Not many entertainments are so expensive, not even cinema. And not counting that there is a possibility that in 4-5 years, the hardware ceases to work and needs maintenance, maybe even expensive maintenance.

That being said, it is people who set the prices. If you have a good reward and enjoy watching that old unit (which is indeed beautiful) manage an old 3" disc and booting an old DOS in your old Atmos, then it is just a matter of how much are you willing to pay for it. Many people pay huge amounts just to watch a football match, which is something I find terribly boring.

I love my Oric. I have it permanently set up on a desk, though I boot it just from time to time to test things I develop, load tapes or disk images using Cumulus... very often using real disks. A few times a year I might turn it on just to play something. But I would not pay 200 eur for an Oric, and less for a Microdisc (though I'd love to have one). Those prices are not for me. I prefer travelling or going to the theater. It is a matter of priorities, I guess.

And, of course, everyone has the right to sell they hardware at the highest possible price!

Mmm not sure. This price escalation does no good. We are buying hardware which is 30+ years old just for nostalgic reasons, maybe for preservation.

Your calculation has a small flaw, I'd say. How many times in a year will you enjoy, or actually use at all, that hardware? That Microdisc with a 3" unit, that makes it almost impossible to transfer disk images to it? Once a month? Every two months? A few days during your holidays? The rest of the time it will be there, just as a collector's device, or even worse, stored in a locker most of the time.

It is not a flaw but a feature. Usage price means that you pay for the convenience of being able to use it at any moment you want. That convenience has a price.
The alternative would be to rent that hardware (assuming there were business to rent it to you) but then you would have the additional burden of going to the shop to retrieve it, using it as quickly as possible to keep the rental fees low and bringing it back to the shop once done.

Even then, assuming you used that Microdisk only two weeks per year, it will still cost you way more to rent over 10 years than the current eBay price.

So in the end, I think the notion of "usage price" is a nice way to put the costs and advantages of possession in perspective.

I love my Oric. I have it permanently set up on a desk, though I boot it just from time to time to test things I develop, load tapes or disk images using Cumulus... very often using real disks. A few times a year I might turn it on just to play something. But I would not pay 200 eur for an Oric, and less for a Microdisc (though I'd love to have one). Those prices are not for me. I prefer travelling or going to the theater. It is a matter of priorities, I guess.

Of course.
This said, if you do track your budget you will probably find that we can spend way more than these 200 euros for things that are in the end way less enjoyable than our retro stuff.

Humans talk about priorities and logic all the time but we actually act very irrationally most of the time.

Also, as I said, if, in the end, one finds out that they their Oric was not worth 200 euros, they can still sell it and get their money back.
It is overall a fairly safe purchase, the price of retro computers will not go down on the long run as they become rarer.

Telestrat machines are very rare (only a few dozen thousand models sold).
If you give a look at other old rare items prices (cars for example) even before eBay or the Internet, these prices seem relatively reasonable.

Old cars can easily cost millions of dollars even though their second hand value was almost zero when their production was stopped (car prices drop extremely quickly after they leave the shop). We are far from seeing the same value multipliers in the retro world.

The Telestrat was sold for 608 € (in 2018 €) in 1986, to reach the level of old collection cars, it would have to be sold for at least 6000 € (a 10x multiplier, similar to that of old cars), we are not there (yet).